Dr. James Jennings, a political scientist, never got hired at MIT. In 1996, he was offered a job as director of MIT’s Community Fellows Program, which trains Black and Hispanic activists. He rejected the offer, though, because it came without tenure — which he then had at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.
After a faculty member told Jennings he was faulted for not being one of the nation’s top three Black scholars, Jennings took his complaint to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, the state’s equivalent of the equal opportunity commission. Once MCAD ruled in his favor, Jennings prepared to take the suit to court, but the case was eventually settled out of court. Jennings is now a tenured professor of urban planning at Tufts University.
MIT officials say they hope the review of personnel practices will finally solve the institution’s difficulties with faculty diversity. MIT compares it to a 1999 study on the status of women in the sciences, which led the institution to admit to gender discrimination, equalize salaries and space allocations and appoint Hockfield in 2004 as its first woman president.
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